Susan Taubes - The Absent God

The Absent GodAuthor(s): Susan Anima TaubesReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Jan., 1955), pp. 6-16Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1201142 .Accessed: 01/04/2012 06:50

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THE ABSENT GOD

SUSAN ANIMA TAUBES*

I

WT EN Neitzsche announced that God is dead, he planted the V 3seed for a new kind of atheism

which has become a major theme of European thinkers in our century and which found its most uncompromising formulation in the posthumously published notes of the French philosopher- mystic-saint, Simone Weil. Atheism, which used to be a charge leveled against skeptics, unbelievers, or simply the in- different, has come to mean a religious experience of the death of God. The god- lessness of the world in all its strata and categories becomes, paradoxically and by a dialectic of negation, the signature of God and yields a mystical atheism, a theology of divine absence and nonbeing, of divine impotence, divine noninterven- tion, and divine indifference.

Religious atheism is distinct from secular atheism from the start, in that it in- vests the natural world, from which divine presence and providence have been totally excluded, with theological significance. He who, seeking God, does not find him in the world, he who suffers

the utter silence and nothingness of God, still lives in a religious universe: a universe whose essential meaning is God, though that meaning be torn in contra- diction and the most agonizing para- doxes. He lives in a universe that is absurd, but whose absurdity is signifi- cant, and its significance is God. God, however negatively conceived, explains the world, explains the nothingness of God in the world. The thesis of religious atheism has been most boldly formulated by Simone Weil: the existence of God may be denied without denying God's reality.

God's absence is not a temporary ill brought about by the sinfulness of a gen- eration, as when the prophet Isaiah la- ments that God has turned away from his people and hid his face from man, be- lieving that there was a time when God was present and that there will be a time when he will show his face again. Simone Weil has universalized the historical experience of the death of God into a theological principle. The unworldliness of God, his silence, and nothingness are his most essential features. God can be present to us only in the form of his absence.

The situation that Nietzsche represented by the image of the death of God grew out of several revolutions in con- sciousness, each of which voiced its particular challenge to Christianity. These movements range from the critical investigation of sacred Christian history to the final shattering of faith in divine providence in the moral catastrophe of the twentieth century. They encompass

* Susan Anima Taubes is Josiah Royce Fellow at Radcliffe College, preparing her doctoral dissertation on the theological elements in Heidegger's philosophy. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1951 in philosophy and in that year was awarded the Bryn Mawr European Fellowship, which enabled her to study in Paris and Jerusalem. Her previous publications include "A Critical Discussion of Camus' L'Homme rdvolt," in Yiun, Philosophical Journal of the Hebrew University (1952); "The Na- ture of Tragedy," Review of Metaphysics (1953); and "The Gnostic Foundations of Heidegger's Nihilism," Journal of Religion (July, 1954).

6

THE ABSENT GOD 7

the scientific technological transforma- tion of a hierarchically created universe into a blind mechanical process; the empirical investigation of the religions of the world leading to the relativization of Christian dogma and institutions; the progressive undermining of faith, first, by Marxian theory, that exposed religion as political ideology, and then by psychological and psychoanalytical theory, that reduced "religious experience" to behav- ioristic and subjective categories. The scientific conception of the universe and the critical inquiry into the nature of man and society have relegated religious "symbols" to the level of useful or useless, dangerous or therapeutic, fictions.

The march of optimistic humanism was, however, almost from the start ac- companied by apprehensions, which, under the impact of the political and economic events of the last decades, ripened into an acute anxiety and despair, manifest in the general hunger for religion in our day.

Simone Weil was neither an apologist for the traditional faith, trying to defend it against materialistic attacks, nor a fugitive from the emptiness and confu- sion of the secular world to the fortress of an orthodox religious frame of reference. Jewish by birth, she refused baptism, choosing to identify herself with the "im- mense and unfortunate mass of unbelievers." She tried to meet the modern challenge to the authenticity of religious life not by taking issue with the claims of empirical science but by accepting them. The mortification of God in the world becomes the theological starting point for the life of the spirit in God. She discovered the reality of God in the phenomena that seemed to testify most forcibly against it: in the meaningless suffering of the concentration camps, in the futility of manual labor, in the coercive necessity

of matter, in the mechanistic behaviorism of the human psyche. And she succeeded in coining a religious vocabulary from the profoundest experience of the absence of God.

The theology that emerges from the notes of Simone Weil is conditioned by the contemporary experience of atheism. But while she has illuminated the depths of contemporary affliction and inhu- manity with unfailing purity of insight, she has divorced them from their historical causes and formalized the impotence of the age into a theological category. Thus the uprootedness, the nakedness, and the hopelessness of man today reveal him in his ultimate essence.

Affliction does not create human misery, it merely reveals it. It is precisely in the enslavement and degradation of man in our times that she discovers the Christian image of man. Describing her experience at the Renault factory, where she worked for a year in order to share the lot of the workers, Simone Weil writes: "There I received forever the mark of a slave, like the branding of the red-hot iron which the Romans put on the foreheads of their most despised slaves. Since then I have always regarded myself as a slave."

It was through the experience of industrial labor, where the atomization of the individual and the dehumanization of man to a mere thing reaches one of its peaks, that Simone Weil for the first time envisaged Christianity as an answer to human suffering. "There the conviction was suddenly borne in upon me that Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belong- ing to it, and I among others." In the ordeal of twentieth-century fascism and atheism, the Christian symbols regain their significance. Stripped of his humanity, man once more envisages himself in

8 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION

the image of a slave. Simone Weil speaks from the very heart of the Christian experience when she discovers, in the last nudity and wretchedness of man, his genuine spirituality.

She saw the greatness of Christianity in that it does not seek for a supernatural remedy for suffering but for a supernatural use of suffering. Her Christianity, however, goes only as far as the Cross, the image of the crucified and humiliated God. And in her Letter to a Priest, where she discusses the obstacles to her conversion to the Catholic faith, she re- pudiates, point by point, the major dog- mas of the church regarding resurrection, providence, immortality, miracles, and eschatology.

II Simone Weil's meditations center in the

problem of evil and the effect of affliction on the soul. Affliction, in distinction from simple suffering, represents a total uprooting of life in all its parts-social, psychological, as well as physical. Affliction "takes possession of the soul and marks it through and through with its own particular mark, the mark of slavery." It stamps man with the scorn, the disgust, and self-hatred, the sense of guilt and de- filement, which crime ought to produce but actually does not. There is a pitiless realism in Simone Weil's analysis of the effect of affliction on the human soul, which seems to defy any attempt to glorify it. We like to believe that affliction ennobles man, but actually the contrary is true, for the afflicted person does not contemplate his affliction, "he has his soul filled with no matter what paltry comfort he may have set his heart on." Affliction degrades whomever it touches and can evoke only the revulsion of those who behold it.

The model of the slave, not the model

of the hero or the model of the martyr, determines Simone Weil's insight into affliction. Affliction proceeds from chance and blind mechanism; "affliction is anonymous before all things, it deprives its victims of their personality and makes them into things." The slave emerges as the model of affliction in a technological society whose blind mechanism makes both heroism and martyrdom meaningless as human possibilities and which finds its image in the impotent victim, in the industrial worker, or in the prisoner in a concentration camp, who suffers not as a man in the hands of men but as a thing battered around by im- personal forces. It is a world in which man as such, man as an autonomous person and source of action, has no being; personality and organism crumble in a calculus of forces; and it remains merely to distinguish between two orders of necessity: gravity and grace.

Gravity, whereby Simone Weil under- stands the strictest Cartesian determin- ism, governs all natural phenomena, and man's soul as well as his body is caught in the mechanism of the world. Man's social behavior, his imagination, his emotions, desires, and beliefs-in short, all the natural movements of the soul--obey quantitative laws as rigid as those that rule physical phenomena. By a law of compensation, suffering is necessarily converted into either violence or hatred. Any blow we suffer, whether in the form of a pain or an insult, is automatically communicated to some person or object outside us in a sense as material as the transfer of force in the action and reac- tion of atoms.

Affliction cuts one of our innumerable threads of attachment to the world. A vacuum is created in the soul, of which it tries to rid itself either by transferring it to another creature by inflicting a wrong

THE ABSENT GOD 9

or by "filling" it through the action of a compensatory imagination. The psyche is essentially governed by a horror vacui. It cannot tolerate any emptiness, and its basic activity consists in filling up the void that is continually communicated to it by other psyches likewise determined to get rid of the void created in them. Under the law of gravity both forgiveness and compassion are impossible. The realm of human relations presents a field of force where there is a perpetual trans- mission of evil from man to man. Unless we suppose the action of a force radically different from that of gravity, it would be utterly beyond man's power to arrest evil.

It is through the contemplation of "human mechanics" that Simone Weil is led to conceive of the necessity of grace. The possibility of a power which can withstand the force of gravity and endure the void created in the soul through affliction implies the intervention of a force of a different order, the supernatural action of grace.

Grace alone can give the soul the strength to suffer the void, to "go on loving in the emptiness." We do not love God because he exists; our love is the proof and the very substance of his reality. "God is absent from the world except through the existence of those in this world in whom his love lives." Thus to affirm and at the same time to deny God's existence is a "case of contradic- tories which are true. God exists. God does not. Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am quite sure my love is not illusory. I am quite sure that there is not a God in the sense that I am quite sure nothing real can be anything like what I am able to conceive when I pronounce this word."

Simone Weil's notion of "atheism as a

purification" goes even further. Since God can be present in the world only in the form of absence, "we have to believe in a God who is like the true God in everything except that he does not exist." It is precisely to the extent that we have dissociated from our love of God the least sense of consolation (including the consolation that God exists) that our love is real. The subjective and pragmat- ic motives that modern psychology and sociology have discovered in all forms of religiosity do not necessarily lead to an attitude of cynicism but, on the contrary, serve to purify our notion of the supernatural.

Simone Weil criticizes the basic Chris- tian doctrines of the immortality of the soul, resurrection, divine providence, and eschatological hope as forms of consolation that are obstacles to faith. While belief in God as a consolation actually insu- lates the soul from contact with the true God, atheism that endures the emptiness of God's absence is a purification. Doubt is not incompatible with faith, for faith is not identical with belief; it is "loving in the emptiness"; it is "fidelity to the void."

Simone Weil's mysticism of atheistic purification bears some resemblance to the "dark night of the soul" of St. John of the Cross, to whom she frequently re- fers in her notes. But while the Spanish mystic is describing an ecstatic experience of the soul's death prior to its re- birth in God, for Simone Weil the dark night of God's absence is itself the soul's contact with God. When she speaks of an "ineffable consolation" that fills the soul after it has renounced everything, renounced even the desire for grace, she does not mean that supernatural love is something distinct from the acceptance of the void. To endure the void, to suffer evil, is our contact with God. The path of


Simone Weil's thought "from human misery to God" has the sense of a "cor- relation" and not a compensation. Afflic tion contains the seed of divine love. "By redemptive suffering, God is present in extreme evil. For the absence of God is the mode of divine presence which corre- sponds to evil-absence which is felt."

III The psychological analysis of affliction

brought into light the existence of two irreducibly contrary forces-grace and gravity. On the level of the theological interpretation of evil, however, grace and gravity are shown to be two aspects of the same divine reality. The soul that goes on loving in the emptiness and consents to affliction knows that "this world, in so far as it is completely empty of God, is God himself" and that "necessity, in so far as it is absolutely other than the good, is the good itself." But how can God, who is the source of the good, wear the mask of evil? Why has God hidden himself behind the "screen" of creation, so that we can love him only in the form of the "inconsolable bitterness" of his absence? This is perhaps the most des- perate formulation of the question that has haunted theology ever since the Cre- ator of the world was envisaged as one supreme and infinitely good God.

If God is the supreme Creator, then he is responsible for all evil, including the crimes committed by men; if God is not responsible for the evil in the world, then we must suppose that there exists a being whose power is equal to God's. The efforts of orthodox theology have been di- rected toward maintaining the omnipo- tence of God without making God responsible for evil. Simone Weil argues that God can be supreme and innocent at the same time because he is impotent. The Son of God was crucified; his Father

allowed him to be crucified; these are the two aspects, Simone Weil writes, of God's impotence.

God suffers and consents to evil. But whence does the evil spring originally? Evil arises out of the fact that there is something other than God, namely, the world and all its creatures. Simone Weil does not shrink from saying that, as the creator of the world, God is the author of evil and likewise the author of sin. But creation does not mean the exercise of divine power, it is the abdication of God, the sacrifice of God. Through creation, God renounced being everything.

Creation and sin are the same thing viewed from different perspectives. "The great crime of God against us is that he created us; that we exist. Our great crime against God is our existence. When we forgive God our existence, our existence is forgiven by God." Why God abdicated his power in favor of cosmic necessity, by creating an autonomous universe, remains an incomprehensible mystery for Simone Weil. We must consent to the world, consent to necessity and to the suffering of the innocent, because God has consented. Finally, it is by consenting to God's will that we can expiate the crime of our existence and become nothing.

Man's consent to be nothing is essentially the same as the acceptance of the void and involves the action of grace. Conversely, God's consent not to be everything, God's impotence, manifests itself as the mechanism of gravity. De- creation is a process of uprooting one's self, of accepting and loving the affliction that tears the soul from its social and vital attachments. Indeed, suffering implies the superiority of man over God, and "the incarnation was necessary so that this superiority should not be scandalous."

THE ABSENT GOD 11

The paradox of consenting to evil and suffering it to the limit as a way of attaining the good leads to the verge of nihilism. For if affliction is the proof of God's supreme love, why should we not deliberately uproot, degrade, and destroy both ourselves and others? If we were created in order that we should de-create ourselves, why should we not choose suicide, or why should we try to avert or to assuage the suffering of others? If the death of the self is desirable, if existence as such is evil, why should murder and destruction be condemned?

To consent to affliction, Simone Weil claims, is to consent to the will of God. Affliction, therefore, must be inflicted by God and "through his own instruments." The afflictions which we trace to "human mechanism"-social injustice, political oppression, and economic exploitation-- are as much an instrument of God, a supernatural device for revealing to man the wretchedness of natural attachments, as are flood, earthquake, and disease. "Human crime, which is the cause of most affliction, is a part of blind necessity." And since extreme affliction always involves social degradation, it is, finally, the "social animal" that gives affliction its specific and absolute stamp.

Whenever we pray "Thy will be done," we should think of "all possible misfortunes added together," because only at the point where suffering becomes intolerable, will the cords that at- tach us to the world break. But at the same time she counsels us not to seek affliction deliberately. "We must not seek the void, for it would be tempting God if we counted on supernatural bread to fill it."

To inflict violence on one's self or on others is therefore contrary to grace. Does it follow that we ought to do good, to prevent evil, or to help those who are

afflicted? For Simone Weil the question as such is baseless, for man cannot do good. All action is subject to the law of gravity, and "only suffering, useless in appearance and perfectly patient," can arrest evil. The condemnation of crime and suicide springs only from the fact that they are actions; the nature of the good, however, is passive, for it reflects the impotence of God. We cannot imitate God through creativity-this necessarily leads to evil-but only through obedience. Simone Weil speaks of acts of charity as supernatural; moreover, at a certain stage of spiritual perfection it is as impossible for a man not to help a creature in need as it is for a stone to defy gravity. Nevertheless, charity remains inexpli- cable on the plane either of grace or of gravity, and the mystery of charity is analogous to the mystery of creation itself: "Why has God created us? But why do we feed those who are hungry?" We can no more comprehend the value of charity than the goodness of creation.

The soul's movement toward God in Simone Weil's mysticism is conceived in terms of an intellectual skepsis rather than ecstatic experience. She makes no claim to voices or visions and is suspi- cious of states of spiritual intoxication. Voices and visions, she writes, result from an illegitimate admixture of imagination in supernatural love; and the lives of the saints would have been still more wonderful without them.

To imagine that one is in paradise is a "horrible possibility," for every paradise is artificial and the mystical experience of eternal blessedness is simply a glorified projection of earthly happiness. The true union with God is not beatific but cruci- fying, for we become one with God in void and slavery, one with the crucified God.


IV The Gnostic traits of Simone Weil's

mysticism are striking at first sight. And her notebooks contain ample evidence of her familiarity with Gnostic, Manichae- an, and Catharist sources. Her intellec- tualism in matters of faith, the obsession with purity, the notion of transcendental immanence, and the pathos of the non- existent God place her in the line of Gnostic heretics.

Simone Weil adopts the basic motifs of the gnosis, the absent God, the divine void, the world order as an all-embracing predatory mechanism wherein man is imprisoned, the pneuma or divine part of the soul that is opposed to both the body and the psyche, and the dialectical unity of the supernatural self and the supernatural God, but eliminates the eschatological drama and the mythological frame. She reinterprets the gnosis by rob- bing or "purifying" it of its aura of positive transcendence, of its visions of the splendor of the utterly strange and utterly new God, its sense of genuine libera- tion from the bonds of necessity.

The God of the Gnostics, however strange, absent, and unknown, is yet a God of dazzling splendor, of light and joy, a God of life. The Gnostics, like the early Christians, refer to the divine spark in man as the life. Life liberated from the chains of the flesh and death, freedom, a kind of folly and fever, a sense of quickening and ecstasy, and, above all, hope in redemption and resurrection in God char- acterize the quality of spirit. Where the gnosis is inconsistent, confusing the experience of the nothingness of God with visions of apocalypse and the triumph of the good, Simone Weil is logical to the bitter end. Supernatural love is not a quickening of the soul; it is a kind of death. Once we understand that truth is

on the side of death, we have no right to project even the most sublime image of life on the plane of the supernatural or the hereafter. Freedom and the sense of spiritual exaltation are the illusions of life; they are inextricably bound up with the world we must renounce. Therefore, it is futile to seek through the supernatural "a slackening of the chains of necessity. The supernatural is more precise, more rigorous than the crude mechanism of matter .... It is a chain over a chain, a chain of steel over a chain of brass."

The power and the glory and the Kingdom are images of this world. Simone Weil accuses the early Christians and the Gnostics of making God "more," and thereby less, than supernatural. The gospel of Resurrection is still tainted with the attachment to life. The proof of God is not Resurrection but the Cross. "Hitler could die and return to life again fifty times," Simone Weil writes; "I should still not look upon him as the Son of God. And if the gospel omitted all mention of Christ's resurrection, faith would be easier for me. The Cross by itself is enough."

The figure of the crucified Jesus, aban- doned by God and dying without hope of resurrection, does not, however, yield the image of man's tragic complaint against a deaf sky-an image not without some human grandeur, for it implies that man in his conscious moral anguish is superior to an amoral universe. The contemporary situation does not lend itself to a tragic interpretation; its image is not the hero fighting against great odds and defeated in the end but the masses of helpless victims subjected to meaningless waste and torture, defeated from the be- ginning. Its image is not the sinner who wilfully transgresses God's law, but the oppressors and the oppressed alike as mere victims of a mechanism of drives

THE ABSENT GOD 13

and compensations. Its image is not even that of the martyr, for martyrdom, like heroism, can be chosen; but "one cannot choose the Cross ... .The Cross is infinitely more than martyrdom. It is the most purely bitter suffering, penal suf- ering."

V It was surely a profound experience of

the pits of unredeemed human suffering in the contemporary world, combined with a pitiless realism regarding the ef- fects of affliction on men's souls, that led Simone Weil to realize that any attempt to resurrect the dead God is doomed to remain romantic rhetoric. Her insight into the fact that God dies in the souls of men subjected to the extremes of torture and humiliation drove her to devise a religion of a dead God: a God who is not so much unmanifest because he is the pri- mordial and inexhaustible source of all that can become manifest, a God who is not so much transcendental because he is beyond the limitations of time, space, and necessity, but a God who does not exist, who emptied himself into the world, trans- formed his substance in the blind mechanism of the world, a God who dies in the inconsolable pits of human affliction. This God is, finally, more alien to the living person and to the visionary life of the spirit than the blind mechanism of nature, for while nature may constrain and imperil life, this God asks man to renounce his attachment to life al- together.

By way of a negative theodicy, Simone Weil interprets the complete absence of justice, mercy, and the good in the world as the sign of divine justice and goodness. Thereby she defends divine justice, but not without destroying the possibility of man's justice. The negative theodicy at- tains its most powerful formulation in the

image of the crucified God. For it is God himself who suffers in the flesh and soul of every afflicted creature. "God is at once a sacrificial victim and an all-powerful ruler." The theological solution, which represents the murderer and his victim united in the selfsame person of God, merely obscures the fact that, in reality, the murderers are two, standing over against each other, divided by a gulf that separates the living from the dead and that magnifies a human dilem- ma to cosmic dimensions.

There is no answer to the suffering of the helpless, to the tortures of the concentration camps, to the slow death of manual labor. "To explain suffering," Simone Weil writes, "is to console it; therefore, it must not be explained." And yet, by finding theological uses for suffering, she has, in whatsoever unjust and absurd a manner, striven to justify and to rationalize it. To say that the cries of the afflicted praise God, that supernatural grace fills the voids of the crippled and the humiliated, is finally as grave an insult to the hells of human suffering as to say that the suffering of the innocent is rewarded in heaven or serves God's final purpose. There is no meddling with human suffering, and Simone Weil knew this. The suffering she had in mind was the ultimate hell that reduces men to a mass of shrieking flesh and then to inert matter, that robs them of their capacity to feel and to act as men. Simone Weil understood that for this suffering there is no answer. Her deepest insights are those which reveal that extreme affliction plunges the soul beyond the pale of redemption and which show that, in fact, suffering, and not sin, brings damnation. But even while she realized that the soul dies in the hideous pits of affliction, she refused to accept it--the thirst for redemption was sufficient proof for its reali-


ty-and thus she tried through a series of spiritual experiments to find a way to strengthen, train, and prepare a part of the soul for the worst affliction.

What is at stake for Simone Weil in the question of the reality of God is the survival of man's soul, his capacity for love, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, and his joy in reality, even under slavery, degradation, impotence, exile, and pain, even under the most terrible tortures. Life itself and all attachments to this world seemed worth sacrificing if only a spark of love could be made to enter the petrified soul of the afflicted in the concentration camps. She started by asking, How can this cross be borne? She ended by exalting the Cross into the sole union with God and the end of all spiritual striving.

But the hells of the afflicted are unredeemable. This is what Ivan Karamazov meant when he said that it is beyond God's power to make good a single tear from a single child. Simone Weil writes: "We have to say, like Ivan Karamazov, that nothing can make up for a single tear from a single child, and yet to accept all tears and the nameless horrors which are beyond tears. . . . We have to accept the fact that they exist simply because they do exist." But acceptance is as ir- relevant as revolt before the irreparable, before that which simply is. Revolt at least transcends man's impotence in the face of the particular unredeemable fact, by stating that such a fact should not be possible and by demanding that it should not be permitted to exist. What is meant is not the permission of God but of men.

The Cross, as Simone Weil knew, is more than martyrdom. The sufferings of the destitute, the persecuted, and the oppressed are not a ritual but a reality. Was it her continual failure, despite many efforts, to take this reality upon

herself that drove her to construe suffering as a spiritual exercise? For she left the Renault factory after a year's "experience" to return to her academic circle and did not lose herself in the anonymity of the masses. After an accident in the Spanish civil war she accepted the rescu- ing hand of well-to-do parents, while others died and rotted away in camps. Hitler came, and she followed her parents, if unwillingly, to Portugal, North Africa, the United States, and England. One cannot help suspecting that, by a strange twist of honesty, she felt impelled to confront affliction in spurious ways, on the level of "spiritual experience," because she did not succeed in meeting it in reality.

It is a romantic illusion that one can go to the people and share their lot as long as one retains the possibility of re- turning to one's former life of security whenever one chooses. The people have no other resources. If one would share the condition of the poor, one must go among them as one enters a cloister, leaving one's securities and resources behind. Otherwise, one remains a spectator. For the gravity of their lot consists just in its hopeless finality.

The attempt to introduce contemplation in physical suffering results in a kind of aestheticism. Affliction, Simone Weil claims, reveals man's essential wretchedness and thus his spirituality. But is this not to confuse man's capacity for moral anguish with the facts of physical pain and social degradation? It would seem that there is a distinction between man's metaphysical reflection on his human condition and the kind of violent physical torment and social dislocation Simone Weil means by affliction. The distinction is rather crucial, for while man's con- sciousness of his own frailty may indeed reveal his greatness, the tortures of the

THE ABSENT GOD 15

concentration camps and the ruthless uprooting of human beings reveal, if anything, the abyss of human bestiality.

Simone Weil shows with unfailing insight how man's social dependence, his need for "moral food," reveals his vul- nerability; and she uses man's vulnera- bility as the pivotal point on which man's spirituality turns, by way of de- tachment from the social as well as the vegetative realm. But the spirituality of human suffering is rooted, if at all, in the spirituality of human existence, the spe- cifically human relations whose destruction can mutilate and even kill man's spirit. The religions that teach the "supernatural value" of suffering exploit man's image of an ideal human commu- nity and his longing to realize it, while they bid him to renounce attaining it and to acquiesce in his condition.

It is the specific mark of human suffering that it points beyond the sheer im- mediacy of pain to an ideal norm which applies to man as such within a historical reality. The chain of the oppressed of all ages burdens man not merely by its.physical weight but as a wrong. It has been the crime of religion against humanity to teach men that slavery under whatever form is not a wrong but a fate. It reaches its most scandalous expression in the view that the suffering of the innocent is a special sign of the love of Gcd. Thereby religion not only sanctions the present sufferings of the injured but paralyzes the nerves of a historical human commu- nity based on a mutual responsibility between the generations.

The purity of Simone Weil's experience of the Cross and her genuine desire for identification with the injured and the oppressed render her religion of suffering all the more tragic. For her mystical atheism offers a religion to the afflicted only at the price of blindfolding one's

self to the fact of those who profit from their affliction and consequently serving their ends.

VI

Simone Weil assimilated both the psychological and the sociological critique of religion. Her analysis of the psychological motivations and social horizon of the early Christian does not fall short of the descriptions of either Marx or Nietzsche and is as devastating. At the same time she answered Nietzsche's contemptuous and Marx's indignant characterization of Christianity as a religion for slaves, by embracing the identity of slavery and religion without apology or reservations. She was fully aware of the role of compensation in traditional religion and tried to develop a theology which could in no way be reduced to a compensatory-es- capist mechanism, since it rested on a total renunciation of desire and extinc- tion of hope, on the one hand, and a total surrender to brute actuality, on the other. She envisaged a God whose reality was beyond doubt because he revealed himself only at the point where the mechanism of compensation was arrested and attention was fixed on the point of suffering.

What Simone Weil failed to realize was that the social implications of her negative theology were not essentially different from those of positive theology, so that the sociological critique of religious mystification applied to the Gcd of impotence as well as to the God of power. It would seem, then, that in the end she did not meet the challenge of enlightened humanism to Christianity, for her attempt to purify Christian theological symbols from the element of power remains trapped in the social dialectic of domination. The alternative to domination is not impotence but the elimination


of domination. Impotence is only one side of the power relation and presupposes the relation of man's domination over man.

Simone Weil's negative theodicy of divine impotence presupposes a powerful God who voluntarily abdicates his power. Behind the void of divine absence looms the figure of an all-powerful God who, by an act of withdrawal, sets the grim mechanism of necessity in motion and lets evil take its course. Thus, in the end, the human implications of serving the "dead God" and of being in the hands of the living God are equally am- biguous. Simone Weil attacks the living God, represented by the God of Israel, as a form of social idolatry. The religion of power may have been guilty of idolizing the aspirations of a particular communi- ty; but is not Simone Weil in her way also guilty of projecting the impotence

and the hopelessness of a particular human society into the divine being?

Regarded from the point of view of man, theodicy is an offense against human justice; from the point of view of God, it is blasphemy against the divine being. The book of Job presents the most poignant formulation of the problem of theodicy and at the same time its most powerful refutation. Job believed to the end that the suffering of a just man is unjust and did not speculate on the supernatural uses of suffering. He questioned the justice of God, and the Almighty answered him out of the whirlwind that the Creator of heaven and earth cannot be called to account by his creatures. Other- wise, we must hold with Lucretius that the gods are so remote from the affairs of men that, for all intents and purposes, men must carry on their pursuit as if the gods did not exist.

Documents

Susan Taubes - The Absent God